In a little more than ten years after its first baby steps into the digital age, Nikon's efforts have nearly put the final nail in the coffin for its film cameras. The company has decided to abandon its roots in the film camera industry and move full steam ahead with its ever expanding lineup of digital camera products. The company is also seeing rising demand for digital SLR cameras as traditional film and P&S digital camera owners decide to upgrade. Digital cameras now make up for 95% of Nikon's total camera sales.

However, all is not lost for the hardcore Nikon film camera fans out there. According to Nikon, they will still manufacture the F6 (professiona) and FM10 (amateur) as well as the manual focus 85mm f/2.8D PC Micro-Nikkor lenses. Support for these products will continue for ten years after Nikon's last date of sale.

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When I heard they had an 8 megpixel CCD I knew the film camera was dead. Film is about 8 megapixels or so in resolution. Good thing is that the Nicon lens will fit the Digital Cameras to so no need to toss the kit just yet.

Well, there are still a ton of neat things a film camera can do that a digital one can't. Nothing the amature or wedding-photographer would be interested in though. Mostly hard-core professional art photographers and students.

You need to read some more about 35mm film. Although it is not digital, it has been compared to digital format at more than 50MP. Yes, 40MP. It has to do with the [b]fine grain of film.[/b] Digital is not there yet.

This is certainly true for anyone who owns professional slide scanners(35mm). The 35mm format has amazing detail. Nikon's 35mm scanners, scan 35mm at 4000DPI. This is about 30MP. Minolta has a scanner that is 5400DPI which is comparable to 40MP but I don't consider this "professional". You really need a [b]drum scanner[/b] for professional results. Then, there is [b]medium and large format films[/b] which have even more resolution.

I just don't understand why people think 35mm film is "low-resolution". If 35mm was only 8MP comparable, movies on the big-screen would look blurry.

Hmm, not quite. 35mm film can be similar in resolution to 4 to 10MP digital, depending on the type of film (low ISO transparency film is best). Just because it is scanned at 40 to 80MP does not mean that there is actual data other than mostly film grain at that kind of DPI.